Targeting of content consumers is desirable for a wide range of applications from product marketing to reaching a desired political audience for proposes of increasing public awareness with regard to a particular cause, in support of a political candidate or for other reasons.
Content consumers may now access and/or be presented with content via a wide variety of different mechanisms including broadcast programs, on demand programs such as VOD, switched digital video, the Internet, etc. The wide variety of content delivery mechanisms presents someone trying to reach a particular audience, whether that be a potential customer or political supporter, with the difficult problem of how to best allocate marketing resources between the variety of mechanisms and/or content delivery systems which may be used in an attempt to effectively reach a customer.
In order to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, customer actions are often monitored on web sites. This is often referred to as monitoring of “click through” which involves detection and tracking of a customer clicking on an advertisement to visit a website or obtain information presented to the user as part of a web page or advertisement displayed along web content.
The tracking of the success of broadcast advertisements or advertisements presented via a content distribution system which does not support web pages tends to be more difficult since there is often no equivalent to a direct “click through” to be measured since in many cases a user may be presented information via a set top box or television but not have an opportunity to select a web page directly on the device used to present the advertisement. In fact, while a user may promptly seek information via the Internet on a product after being presented an advertisement, e.g., by visiting a product web side advertised on the television, the Web site hosting service generally has no way of knowing that the party contacting the web site for product information or purchase recently was presented with an advertisement for the product on a TV.
In attempting to effectively reach an audience, a marketer will often target an audience with a particular demographic, such as age, income and/or political affiliation. As part of a marketing program, after determining the target audience the marketer often allocates advertising resources to different content delivery methods in attempt to reach the targeted audience. Unfortunately, when allocating resources to different content delivery platforms the advertiser often has little knowledge as to whether advertisements are being presented to the same individuals in a geographic area multiple times via different content delivery mechanisms and/or if the advertiser is reaching the desired number of different potential customers with little overlap in the audience being reached via different advertising channels, e.g., corresponding to different content delivery mechanisms.
While inferences may be made about customers and the success of particular marketing channels, broadcast and VOD service providers are often different from the entities hosting individual web sites. For confidentiality reasons, the broadcast and/or other content providers and web site hosting service providers normally do not share detailed customer information but rather hide the individual identities of customers before sharing or exchanging customer information. This generally makes it difficult or impossible to determine with certainty whether a particular customer who visited a website was also exposed to a particular advertisement or if the same set of customers are being presented with advertisements which are repetitive.
In view of the above discussion it should be appreciated that there is a need for improved methods and apparatus for determining, with a higher degree of certainty, whether advertising is reaching the same or different potential customers via multiple communication channels and/or content delivery systems. It would be desirable if such information could be obtained and provided to marketing individuals without having to disclose the identities of the individual potential customers. It would also be possible if automated methods of reallocating resources between marketing channels could be developed which would allow for dynamic re-allocation of marketing resources between available marketing channels and/or content distribution networks based on information on the audience and/or number of distinct customers being reached as determined by monitoring of various content distribution networks and/or signaling.